Pollution producing hermaphroditic fish in the Potomac River. Is this OK?

OMG, it’s like Blinky the three-eyed-fish from the Simpsons! :-)

Dunno what happens to humans who eat these, but I sure don’t want to…

Honestly, if these chemicals are in our waterways, I am assuming we are also either inhaling them, or drinking them, or something just like the fish. Not sure about eating the fish, what it will do, but I find it all horrific.

No kidding there! You would stop drinking water if you knew what trace amounts of all sorts of hormones and pharmaceuticals are popping up in our water systems. This is a critical problem no one quite knows how to deal with. You don’t really need a prescription for Tamiflu anymore…just drink the water!

I worked with a woman who was from a town in upstate NY and a very large percentage of women she knew had faternal twins, this is before IVF was invented. They figured something was in the environment causing them to pop out more than one egg.

@Cruiser maybe the filtering process cleans our water? But, what I was really referring to is we ingest chemicals, they are purposely put into our foods, and thought to be safe because it is in small quantities, even though they are known to be bad in large quantities, so if the chemicals are being dumped in the water, it is obviously a chemical that is purposely used for something? I don’t think I am being clear. It may not be a chemical in food, it could be a medication as you pointed out, or plastics, who knows.

Probably nothing good.

EDIT: If you want some really interesting information, rent “Food,Inc.”

The Tootsie fish, intriguing.If we eat them we may contract food poisoning maybe Sam & Ella the unisex sickness.

Did Lady GaGa eat fish from the Potomac when she was young?

Ok so you love hermaphrodite porn and lady gaga, we get it already.

@JLeslie It is all of the above. It is the law of unintended consequences we are facing especially when these chemicals start to have potential to interact. I was shocked at the level of “trace” amounts that do make it to our taps. I don’t even want to start to think of the heavy metals we consume!

While we focus and argue over “Climate Change” and Carbon and all that…. our rivers are being polluted with coal waste, medical waste, and plastic compounds, and our forests in Brazil and elsewhere being cut down, and our mountaintops Appalachia and elsewhere being blown off… no wonder there are changes in the fish.

There will be more intersex humans born in the next 50 years, than in the previous 1000 years.

Are they sure it is a new fish, or a change in a fish, and not some hype about a naturally occuring fish?

Sounds like evolution, no?

@Kraigmo & @JLeslie Our rivers are really a whole lot cleaner now, on this 40th Earth Day, than they were when we held the first one back in 1970. I recall when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland in 1969. We had acid rain that was killing off forests. The air in LA was often so polluted that many people could not safely go outdoors.

What we did then cleaned up the stuff you could easily see. But CO2 levels have gone up 19% in that same 40 years. Invisible pollutants are now the problem. It’s harder to fix, and harder to convince people it even needs fixing, because you don’t see it—you see only its effects.

@ETpro I used to swim in the Hudson River, pretty sure it was poison back than. LOL.

@JLeslie I used to beg for the fat mom and dad trimmed off their steak. Live and learn, for those of us fortunate enough to survive our ill-informed past. :-)

@ETpro My mother used to eat chicken fat slathered on bread. My arteries are hardening just thinking about it. :-)

@Dr_Dredd My mother used to eat chicken fat slathered on bread.

My father and grandfather loved bacon fat sandwiches, eggs fried in bacon fat and used lard in all cooking. My grandfather died at one hundred and five, my father is in his nineties and still single-handedly sailing a sixty-two foot ketch around the Pacific – with a wife who is younger than me. He looks to outlive his father and grandfather by a decade or more. There is nothing wrong with saturated fat that isn’t burned, and with all fats that aren’t modified (trans-fats). I live on a high protein and fat diet, with almost no processed carbs. I am very fit and healthy and have difficulty maintaining weight – I keep dropping. Processed carbs are evil, but carbs in fresh produce are healthy.

@DarkScribe Cool. Glad to hear about your healthy family. :-)